which follow he cannot dispel, if he would, the memory of a commanding personality.
Many of us have enjoyed in times past the occasional essay of Professor Sumner, and have wished that we could have it conveniently at hand, either for our own re-reading or that we might the more readily introduce a friend to a sturdy and dauntless personality in the world of thought. It is in response mainly to desires of this order that the present collection has been assembled. I am aware that an occasional favorite will not be found here; some will seek in vain for the haunting phrase or pungent, half-remembered epigram that he would gladly con again. A great deal of Sumner's writing was in the form of short articles, hot from the forge, in newspapers and magazines; but all of these could not be collected and included in the present volume. His famous retort to the youthful socialist — to which no reply was forthcoming — was hard to leave out; so was the laconic Foreword to Professor Cutler's Lynch Law, where Sumner says of lynching, in his characteristic way: "It would be a disgrace to us if amongst us men should burn a rattlesnake or a mad dog. The badness of the victim is not an element in the case at all. Torture and burning are forbidden, not because the victim is not bad enough, but because we are too good." But these shorter treasures could not well go in, and the selection was finally limited to the longer essays. One is the more reconciled to the omissions in the hope that a Life and Letters may at some time see the light, where the many isolated "Sumnerisms" may find appropriate place.
As arranged, the following seventeen essays fall under three main heads, both topicwise and, to a large degree, chronologically as well. Of the first seven all but one are products of the last years of Professor Sumner's life, and all but two were published in 1909 and 1910; the next group (five) run between 1887 and 1894 and have to do chiefly with the practical applications of sociological principles to problems of the time; the following four come between 1896 and 1900, all bearing upon the "pre-
